WeChat Official Accounts (add-on)

This guide shows how to ingest WeChat Official Account (微信公众号) articles into sembr as an optional add-on. WeChat has no official feed API, so this relies on a self-hosted, third-party bridge (wechat2rss) that turns Official Account articles into full-text RSS. sembr then consumes that RSS through its existing feed support — no sembr code change, no new source type.

Optional, third-party, and your responsibility

• sembr does not bundle, ship, or endorse the bridge — you deploy and operate it yourself.
• wechat2rss self-hosting requires a paid license and a dedicated WeChat account you supply (use a secondary account, not your primary one — account-ban risk is real and yours to accept).
• You are responsible for complying with WeChat's Terms of Service in your jurisdiction.
• There is no official API; this is a community workaround whose reliability depends on the upstream bridge.

Why a bridge at all?

WeChat's ecosystem is closed — there is no public, official way to subscribe to an arbitrary Official Account. A bridge logs in with a real WeChat account and re-publishes followed accounts as RSS. Once it's RSS, sembr treats it exactly like any other RSS feed (de-dup, full-text extraction, embedding, intent matching, digests).

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TL;DR (6-step checklist)

1. Buy a wechat2rss self-host license.
2. Deploy the wechat2rss container (docker compose up -d).
3. Open its admin UI and scan-login a dedicated WeChat account.
4. Subscribe the Official Accounts you want (paste an article link per account); copy each feed URL.
5. Put wechat2rss and sembr on a shared Docker network so sembr can reach it by container name.
6. Add an rss feed in sembr pointing at the bridge URL.

The rest of this page walks through each step.

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1. Prerequisites

• A running sembr deployment (Docker Compose).
• A wechat2rss self-host license — see wechat2rss.xlab.app (sold as a software license; it does not include a hosted service).
• A dedicated, non-primary WeChat account to bind as the bridge's read source. Its login session expires periodically (on the order of a few days) and must be re-scanned — plan for that.
• Docker + Docker Compose on the same host as sembr (recommended for the simplest networking).

2. Deploy wechat2rss

Create ~/wechat2rss/docker-compose.yml:

services:
  wechat2rss:
    container_name: wechat2rss
    image: "ttttmr/wechat2rss:latest"
    env_file:
      - .env
    volumes:
      - ./data:/wechat2rss          # persists login session, settings, article cache
    ports:
      - "8080:8080"                 # admin UI + feeds; bind to 127.0.0.1:8080 if you only tunnel in
    networks:
      - wechat2rss-net              # shared network so sembr can reach it by name (see §3)
    deploy:
      restart_policy:
        condition: on-failure
        max_attempts: 3
        window: 10s
    logging:
      driver: "json-file"
      options:
        max-size: "100m"
networks:
  wechat2rss-net:
    external: true                  # created in §3

Create ~/wechat2rss/.env (and chmod 600 — never commit it):

LIC_EMAIL=<license email>
LIC_CODE=<license code>
RSS_HOST=<host:8080>        # only affects the subscription URL shown in the UI
# Optional re-login / health alerts (pick one). Without these the bridge fails silently when its
# login expires, and your WeChat feeds quietly stop updating:
# BOT_SERVER_KEY=<serverchan key>
# BOT_TG_TOKEN=<telegram bot token>   BOT_TG_ADMIN_UID=<your uid>
# BOT_WEBHOOK_URL=<webhook>           BOT_BARK_URL=<bark url>

Start it and confirm the license check passed:

cd ~/wechat2rss && docker compose up -d
docker compose logs --tail=50            # look for the license "Expire" line and the admin "Token"

Login expires; wire up an alert

The bound WeChat session expires every few days and must be re-scanned. Configure one of the BOT_* alert channels above so the bridge tells you when a re-login is needed instead of silently going stale. (sembr's own Feeds tab will also show the affected feeds flat-lining, but that is a lagging signal.)

Bind the account and subscribe

1. Reach the admin UI. If you bound the port to 127.0.0.1, tunnel in: ssh -L 8080:localhost:8080 <host> then open http://localhost:8080. Enter the admin token from the startup logs.
2. WeChat accounts → Add account → scan the QR with your dedicated WeChat account. Complete any login-verification prompt in the page.
3. Subscribe: paste any article link (https://mp.weixin.qq.com/s/...) from each Official Account you want. On success the UI shows that account's feed URL, of the form http://<RSS_HOST>/feed/<biz_id>.xml.

3. Connect the bridge to sembr (production-grade)

sembr's API runs in a container, so it must reach wechat2rss by container name over a shared Docker network — not via host.docker.internal, which only exists on Docker Desktop and is not portable to Linux Docker Engine.

Create an external network and attach both stacks to it (the wechat2rss compose above already declares it):

docker network create wechat2rss-net

sembr's docker-compose.yml lives in the repo and is overwritten by git pull, so don't edit it directly. Instead add a local docker-compose.override.yml next to it — Docker Compose merges it automatically:

# docker-compose.override.yml — local add-on overlay; keep it out of git.
services:
  api:
    networks:
      - default            # keep the default network, or the API loses qdrant / rsshub
      - wechat2rss-net
networks:
  wechat2rss-net:
    external: true

Keep it untracked so git pull never clobbers it:

grep -qxF docker-compose.override.yml .git/info/exclude || echo docker-compose.override.yml >> .git/info/exclude
docker compose up -d          # recreates the api container on the shared network

Verify the API container can reach the bridge by name:

docker exec sembr-api python -c \
  "import urllib.request as u; print(u.urlopen('http://wechat2rss:8080/feed/<biz_id>.xml', timeout=10).status)"
# 200

4. Add the feed to sembr

A WeChat feed is just an RSS feed — no new source type. Use the bridge's container-name URL. Add it from the dashboard Feeds tab, or via the API:

curl -X POST http://127.0.0.1:8000/feeds \
  -H "X-Dashboard-Token: <DASHBOARD_TOKEN>" \
  -H "Content-Type: application/json" \
  -d '{
    "name": "<account name>",
    "url": "http://wechat2rss:8080/feed/<biz_id>.xml",
    "source_type": "rss",
    "poll_interval_minutes": 120,
    "tags": ["wechat"]
  }'

sembr's RSS collector extracts the full article text and strips HTML automatically (it treats WeChat feeds exactly like any other RSS source), so no extra cleanup is needed. Tagging the feeds ("tags": ["wechat"]) makes them easy to manage in bulk.

5. Notes and limitations

• Two-layer polling. Your sembr poll_interval_minutes controls how often sembr pulls the bridge's RSS endpoint (which serves a local cache — cheap). It does not control freshness: how fast new articles appear is set by the bridge's own crawl cadence (typically a few hours, up to ~24h). Polling sembr more often than that just re-fetches the same cache (de-dup discards it). 60–120 minutes is a sensible sembr interval.
• Long articles are truncated for embedding. sembr caps embedding input (~8000 chars) to stay within the embedder's token budget. Very long Official Account research posts are embedded on their leading portion; the full text is still stored.
• Image-only posts carry little text. "一图读懂" / poster-style articles put their content in images, so the extracted text — and therefore semantic matching quality — is thin. That's a content-format limitation, not a bug.
• LAN access trade-off. Binding the admin UI to 0.0.0.0:8080 makes it reachable on your LAN (convenient for re-login from any device); the admin UI is token-gated, but the feed URLs are readable by anyone on the LAN. Bind to 127.0.0.1 and tunnel if you'd rather keep it private.
• License renewal. If the wechat2rss license lapses, the bridge stops and your WeChat feeds go silent — set a reminder before expiry.

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→ Running sembr on a public IP? See Public server for the hardening checklist. → New to sembr feeds? Start with Getting Started.